He had done that which could never be forgiven; he was in the grasp of one who never forgave.
I wish I was as sure of anything as he is of everything.
Man is so inconsistent a creature that it is impossible to reason from his beliefs to his conduct, or from one part of his belief to another.
Temple was a man of the world amongst men of letters, a man of letters amongst men of the world.
History distinguishes what is accidental and transitory in human nature from what is essential and immutable.
It has often been found that profuse expenditures, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundation, have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private citizens have been able to create it.
A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.
Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.
Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularly is indispensable to the creations of the imagination. In proportion as men know more and think more they look less at individuals and more at classes. They therefore make better theories and worse poems.
The real object of the drama is the exhibition of human character.
The most beautiful object in the world, it will be allowed, is a beautiful woman.
History begins in novel and ends in essay.
Mere negation, mere Epicurean infidelity, as Lord Bacon most justly observes, has never disturbed the peace of the world. It furnishes no motive for action; it inspires no enthusiasm; it has no missionaries, no crusades, no martyrs.
The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.
I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both.
To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.
There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.
The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.
He was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.